"Photograph Objects Histories"

"Image content is our familiar way of thinking about photographs at the simplest level. Image content is usually why photographs were purchased, collected, exchanged or given as gifts in the first place, for the indexical appeal (that breif moment of exposure of the real world in front of the camera) is one of the photograph's defining qualities." To me I see some truth in this statement. I think photographs are collected and given as gifts when the subjects are relevant to a certain person. I wouldn't necessarily say that I would care about a photograph that had people I didn't know as the subject, unless it was an antique photograph, or had some special quilty to it. I would say that the "brief moment of exposure of the real world in front of the camera" is one of photography's defining qualities. It is such a unique idea, that is intruiging to many. Photographs are so important to people because it is the only way to document an event. I feel that once you experience something, after that all you have is the memory which becomes vague, but then also the photograph, which will live on, and remind a person of that time.

"...the experience of looking at a historical image on a computer screen is profoundly different in the understandings it might generate from experience of, say, looking at the same image as an albumen print pasted in an album or a modern copy print in an archive file, for the 'grammar' of both images and things is complex and shifting"
I think this is one statement that is often debated that I really feel strongly about. I feel that so many people complain about how the internet ruins out ideas about historical photographs. i can understand and agree with the idea that you might read a photograph in a whole different way, just by the way it is presented, but at the same time I completely appreciate the internet in the sense that, whose to say I would have ever had the chance to see a particular photograph had it not been for the internet. Sure, it isn't the same as being right in front of an original, but at the same time, there aren't always many chances to be able to see an original, or modern copy for that matter. All I have been able to see most of the time is a reproduction of a reproduction, etc. in a textbook or on the internet. But I'll take what I can get.